27.06.1996

The hidden hand

Paul Cockshott resumes the debate with the RDG over the nature of revolution

In the Weekly Worker (April 18), there appeared two articles on republicanism. On Page 7, Dave Craig continued his polemic against me on the topic, whilst on page 6 there appeared the text of the Republican Constitution working group of the SLP. Both these documents bear the marks of the same ideology. In this contribution I will try and develop my case that this ideology is a form of radical bourgeois reformism, not communism.

The hidden hand behind the contributions of the Revolutionary Democratic Group and the working group belongs to a school of what used to be called New Left radicals: writers like Tom Nairn, Perry Anderson, Neal Ascherson. With a series of influential articles in the New Left Review during the mid 1960s – ‘The origins of the present crisis’, ‘Components of a national culture’ - followed up by books such as Lineages of the absolute state, and The enchanted glass, they set the terms in which the New Left saw the origins, development and crisis of British capitalism. With the maturing of the ‘68 generation of radicals, it became in turn the accepted outlook of the constitutional reform movement, Charter 88.

The basic thesis of their historical arguments has been that Britain is still in many respects an ancien régime. The precocious development of capitalism here meant that the bourgeoisie never fully broke with the aristocracy, remaining culturally under its sway. The continued influence of Oxford and Cambridge, the social weight attached to the right accent in speech, etc - were all cited as evidence.

Constitutionally, it was reflected in the survival of the monarchy, the House of Lords and established church. In contrast, continental capitalisms have benefited from a much more definitive break between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, which resulted in a decisive transformation of archaic political and cultural superstructures. The relative failure of British capitalism vis-à-vis other capitalisms has to do with the incomplete development of the superstructure here - the fact that we are subjects not citizens, the continuance of the monarchy, etc.

To quote Ascherson:

“When I speak of Ancient Britons, I am suggesting that we live in an archaic political society. It is commonly and comfortingly said that there is nothing wrong with British institutions - ‘the finest in the world’ - but that they are not working well because the economy is in such a bad state. The reverse is true. The reason that the British economy does not work is that British institutions are in terminal decline.”

The basic perception here is that capitalism is basically a progressive economic system, that the natural tendency of capitalism is to modernise and develop the scale of production.

The key political task is thus to overthrow the ancien régime and set free the creative genius of capitalist production.

This is an unequivocally bourgeois reformist outlook. Where Marx saw the fundamental obstacle to capitalism being capital itself, the New Left saw the obstacles in the political superstructure and the class system. But it is only comparatively recently that coherent Marxist critiques of this New Left view have started to be made. Ellen Meiksins Wood, in The pristine culture of capitalism, argues that, far from being backward, Britain has the most thoroughly capitalist state and culture in Europe. Here we have a state that has for centuries been completely subordinated to civil society, the class interests of capital.

The differences between the British and French states derive not from the greater modernity of the latter, but from the way the French revolutions simply laid hold of the existing state machine developed under absolutism. This left, in France, a greater subordination of civil society to the state. At certain stages, this greater state power has been beneficial to industrial development, constraining and guiding the anarchy of the market. But in France, Germany and Japan, it was the vestiges of the absolutist state that allowed this to occur, not their modernity.

The relative decline of British and then American capitalism should then be seen as stemming from the nature of capitalist society itself. As the first and purest capitalisms, they arrive faster at its decadence.

Now, I would not accuse either Craig or the SLP constitutional group of being bourgeois reformers of the Nairn, Ascherson variety. But there can be no communist practice without communist theory. In the absence of communist theory, radicalism fills the void.

Re-read the analysis of the British constitution from the working group. It rehearses all of the Nairn-Ascherson criticisms of the UK constitution, but it never asks what makes the state a capitalist dictatorship. To ask this question would be to explode the whole Nairn-Ascherson position, since it is not the peculiarities of the British state, but what it shares with the French, Italian ones, etc, that makes it a class dictatorship.

They are class states because: a) They have a monopoly of legitimate violence, whereas the masses are unarmed. b) Positions of power are the effective monopoly of the bourgeoisie - or, as they call themselves here, the middle class.

How is this latter monopoly achieved?

a) To hold the power of prison, you must be a judge. To be a judge you must be a lawyer, the archetypal bourgeois profession.

b) To command the power of the gun you must be an officer. To be an officer you must be selected for Sandhurst. Enough said.

c) To hold the reins of power, you must be an elected politician. To be an elected politician is immediately to acquire middle class status. To be elected you must first be selected by a party, be on the nomenklatura. To be selected as a candidate you must be respectable. A lawyer, a businessman, a lecturer - that will do nicely. Brickies need not apply. This class bias is implicit in elections.

Since the SLP document does not even attempt to identify the class basis of the state, its proposals fail to address these issues. a) Judges are to be elected. So what? They will still be middle class lawyers, and which social group is more adept at winning elections? b) The question of the army is not even addressed. c) As to elected politicians, they propose to make the system far worse than today. At least today we have direct elections, so the process of class selection only operates once. The SLP proposals, modelled on the Soviet system of government, involve four levels of indirect election. Will some people never learn?

If there ever was a failed model, this is it. Elections already concentrate power in the hands of political parties. When you have indirect elections you concentrate this power to the nth degree. Nothing is more likely to lead to the total domination of parliament by a single political party. To get to the top you will have to be approved by the workplace, area, regional and national party organisations. You may start out with elections at workplaces, but, as sure as eggs is eggs, you will end up with Djilas’s ‘new class’, the state bourgeoisie at the top.

When I accused the RDG of slavishly following the example of the Russian Revolution and Soviet system, Craig asks me to provide a better example, and Peter May takes me to task for my disparagement of the likelihood of a Soviet revolution here.

I cannot come up with an alternative example for a revolution here, my foresight not being as good as RDG hindsight. Britain is the paradigmatic advanced capitalist society. We do not know what a revolution in such a society will be like. All previous revolutions have taken place in states that were not yet fully dominated by the capitalist mode of production. This is the big, unavoidable, problem for communists in advanced countries - we have no positive historical examples to go on.

It is far easier to be negative, but in all honesty I must try to respond to the challenge from the RDG to state my own position. I will first present what was the minimum democratic programme of the Workers Party of Scotland, to which I belonged. I will then outline an alternative strategy to the ‘dual power’ scenario of the RDG, by which a democratic revolution might be won.

The WPS minimum political programme asserted:

1. The people are sovereign: no legislative proposal to become law unless passed by referendum.
2. Executive power of the state in the hands of an assembly chosen by lot to ensure genuinely proportional representation of all sections of the people; all state organs under the control of committees of the assembly.
3. People’s assemblies at region, district and community level. Self-administration by the people.
4. Abolition of the standing army and police, and the arming of the people. Education of all men and women in the capability to bear arms. The power of the state defended by citizens’ militias organised on a local and national basis. Payment for militia service. Decisions of war or peace by vote of the people’s assembly; expulsion of foreign military bases; nuclear weapon-free Scotland; withdrawal from Nato.
5. Abolition of official secrecy; freedom of information; freedom of speech, assembly and association; prohibition of capitalist ownership of news media; inviolability of person and domicile.
6. The right to strike.
7. Prohibition of discrimination on grounds of sex, race or religion; desegregation of football and social clubs.
8. Abolition of the judiciary; courts run by juries; free legal aid; right of all to sue any official before a jury.
9. Separation of church from state; schools absolutely secular; right of education in native tongue in state schools for linguistic minorities.

Some of these demands are specific to Scotland, but most would be generally applicable. I think that in addition to such constitutional aims, which might be shared by communists and non-communists alike, a communist party should have minimum economic and social aims: industrial democracy, economic planning, etc. Where the WPS programme differed from that of the RDG was in its utter repudiation of the institutions of republicanism: presidency, an elected parliament or senate, an independent judiciary.

The virtue of these aims is that they enable communists to show that they are unconcerned with sectarian or party advantage, and at the same time to undermine the legitimacy of all existing laws. If referenda are the only legitimisation for laws, then all existing laws can be repudiated in campaigns of civil disobedience.

Suppose that a revolutionary democratic party were established, what steps might it take to achieve a national democratic revolution? Speaking purely hypothetically, it might:

1. Try to use specific injustices such as the Poll Tax and water privatisation to launch campaigns of civil disobedience that would establish the moral right to rebel.
2. Through these campaigns to popularise the idea of direct democracy among the masses, and bring about the realisation that this could only be achieved by democratic revolution.
3. To assert the historic right of the people to organise themselves into militias to defend their rights.
4. To the extent that the state refused to grant democratic demands that had clear popular support, to initiate guerrilla campaigns against the state.
5. To escalate these until the state of strategic equilibrium is reached - the point at which the state has to recognise that it cannot impose a military defeat on the insurgency.
6. Force the state into negotiations over the minimum democratic programme.

This strategy is un-Bolshevik, but elements of it have been used to good effect in Asian and Latin American revolutions. The Russian example has produced a narrowing of vision among western communists who have assumed that guerrilla struggles are impossible in parliamentary industrial states.

Leaving to one side their objectives, the sustained campaign of the IRA, and in a perverse sense the existence of the UDA too, show that working class communities are quite capable of organising militias and guerrilla armies in a modem state. The IRA reached stage 5 and has been on the verge of reaching stage 6, and done this organising within a section that is probably no more than one percent of the total working class population in the British state. It is the only organisation in the territory of the British state that can in any realistic sense be termed revolutionary. The others are only revolutionaries in the sense that German Social Democracy was revolutionary - they see revolution as something chat will happen in the fullness of time, but which it would be adventurist to initiate.

Moral dilemma of revolution

What has to be faced is the moral question of whether or not revolution is justified in this country. Revolution is dangerous to those who attempt it, imposes great suffering on the general population and with its inevitable cruelties coarsens and corrupts the moral senses of those it touches.

But these issues should be faced and debated in all their horrible nakedness. It is dishonest and contemptible to proclaim oneself a revolutionist in name whilst repudiating every concrete step towards it. Far better to be honest social reformers like Arthur Scargill.

The Comintern model

Peter May challenges my assertion that to base one’s strategy upon the rise of a dual power crisis is illusory, since these only arise when an absolute monarchy or dictatorship is defeated in war. Peter cites three apparent counter-examples: Germany, 1918-23; Chile, 1972-3 and Spain in 1936.

I would accept only the last of these. Willhelmine Germany in 1918, like the Tsar’s Russia or Hapsburg Austria, was an imperial monarchy falling as a result of military defeat. Dual power there did not persist beyond the immediate aftermath of that defeat. Chile never had dual power, the cordones industrales were never councils of workers’, soldiers’ and sailors’ deputies in the Russian, German or Portuguese sense. The Chilean military remained solidly in the reactionary camp.

Spain is a valid case, but here again, the dual power arose because of a mutiny or split in the armed forces - though from the right. Comintern expected that the precipitating factor for the British revolution would be the imminent Anglo-American war for world domination. Defeat would produce the dual power crisis. The Washington Treaty of 1922 put an end to that prospect. The Bolshevik model of revolution has never since had any relevance here.

What is the prospect of another cataclysmic war like 1914-18, that would topple the British and other capitalist states? The RDG must be anticipating something prolonged, incredibly bloody, unwinnable and sub-nuclear: a war perhaps between the US and its Allies and China?

The US was unable to beat little Vietnam. It got out before army discipline disintegrated. For all its show of strength off Taiwan, is it really ready to go to war with a PRC that has a billion citizens and nuclear missiles? Such a war is possible, and the British government might just be foolish enough to join in. But capitalist countries with representative systems of government can ride out quite humiliating military setbacks - the Netherlands in Indonesia, France in Algeria, the US in Vietnam. They get out of unwinnable wars before the state is threatened.